Example of Tampering

An
example of vote tampering would involve the voter making the selections, but
with the attacker intercepting the final ballot when submitting it. The ballot
could be recorded after a few items were changed, and it would be difficult to
find any traces of which votes had been modified.
Diebold
systems are used in several states, including Georgia, Maryland, Utah, Nevada,
New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Texas.

"In
light of the rapidly approaching 2012 U.S. Presidential Election, it seems
there may be a need to give serious attention to securing our election
technology," Cameron Camp, security researcher at ESET, wrote on the
company blog. "Unscrupulous, well-heeled bad actors" can easily
gather together a group of hackers, especially if they are politically motivated,
to tamper with votes and swing elections, Camp said.

Last
fall, a Washington, D.C., district system invited a team from the University of
Michigan's College of Engineering to try to breach its pilot of an online
voting system. It took the team only 3 hours to find a SQL injection flaw to
take over the server, change ballot results, cause the site to broadcast the
university's fight song when someone accessed the site, and find personal
information of voters registered on the system.
There
have been several opportunities for cyber-attackers intent on influencing the
political process in recent weeks around the world. During the Russian
elections earlier this month, popular Russian media Websites such as the Moscow
Echo radio station, election monitoring group Golos and the LiveJournal
blogging service were knocked offline by distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
A botnet using a piece of malware was behind some of the DDoS attacks,
according to Sebastien Duquette, a researcher at ESET.
The
DDoS attacks targeted Websites that were discussing election fraud and other
political violations, Moscow Echo's editor in chief claimed.

It's
a plausible scenario as "true political activism is a strong and real
motivator for Internet DDoS attack activity," Mike Paquette, chief
strategy officer of Corero Network Security, told eWEEK. "It is not hard to imagine that fringe groups,
loosely associated with one political party, might employ these cyber-attacks
to generally, or specifically, help their party in certain elections."
DDoS
attacks aren't just a tool for protesters, as the establishment can use it just
as effectively. In Russia, DDoS was used "as a mechanism of propaganda,
censorship, information withholding and unfair political advantage,"
Paquette said.
Three
of the top seven leaders in South Korea's ruling Grand National Party quit
their posts for allegedly tampering with national elections in late October,
the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month. South Korea's
cyber-terrorism police arrested a legislative aide to a top ruling politician
after finding evidence that he launched the DDoS attack on the National
Election Commission's Website on election day. The attack prevented young
voters from being able to find their polling places, and may have suppressed
voter turnout among the demographic that traditionally favor opposition
parties, according to the report.